Posts Tagged ‘Rick Warren’

Usher: It’s a new promotion by Warren’s church. You can now get points based on how much you tithe, how many sermons you buy from their store and for regular attendance!

Deacon: You can’t be serious. What on earth would you use points in church for?

Usher: Are you kidding me Deak? I can get free schmultsy Christian CDs based on how much tithe I give. No one will ever know. I just swipe my card at those cool ATM (automatic tithing machines) in the foyer and it’ll secretly record my points and send me a statement. Grand prize is box seats right up front so I can see Rick and his team, possibly get his autograph and if I can accrue 10,000 bonus points, I can have lunch with him!

Deacon: You’ve got to be off your perch there Usher.

Usher: I’m opting for a picture of Rick on my card, during his invocation with Barack Obama…..I fell blessed.

Usher: Hey Deak, don’t you pity the poor souls who buy into the rhetoric of the mainstream church? Especially the young ones who call themselves “church planters” who work for big old institutions.

Deacon: Kinda. But not really. They’re too young to know any better and they don’t seem to want to do the due diligence it takes to find out that the organization they’re in is simply marketing the institution, not making disciples.

Usher: It really is just like America and the whole American Dream. It’s just that they’re using the brand of “Jesus” instead of Coca Cola or Pepsi or Marlboro.

Deacon: And interestingly enough, they see no wrong in it. They seem to think that “marketing” is making disciples. But in reality, it’s so different.

Usher: Deak, it’d be so much easier if everyone wasn’t so quick to endorse the institution right out of the gate. It’s apparent that the reputation and validity of the institution has to be challenged.

Deacon: At what cost, Usher?

Usher: At any cost. Man was the one that came up with the goofy model back in Constantine’s time and it’s foundation is wide and vast. How is it that it hasn’t been questioned vehemently until today?

Deacon: Yet, the foundation is being shaken. By generations that seem to be more and more willing to speak out against it, due to the egregious acts against society the church has committed (Catholic church pedofiles and gambling priests, Televanglists, crooked Christian entertainers).

Usher: Don’t forget Deak, the only ones that are willing to speak up are those who have nothing to lose!

Deacon: You’ve got plenty of friends that fit into that category Usher.

TULSA — Three more lawsuits rocked scandal-stricken Oral Roberts University on Wednesday, including one claiming Richard and Lindsay Roberts ordered an accountant to “cook the books” to cover up their illegal use of university money for themselves.

Usher: Hey Deak, does it ever end? Priests gamble away tens of thousands and get leave, counseling while they continue giving mass and geta a load of this one; Ricard Roberts spends the people’s money in the name of God on a Mercedes and a Lexus and jet trips for his daughter’s graduation to the Bahamas and they give him a severance! What can we do to get some of that?

Deacon: Entitlement Usher, entitlement. After all, it’s his daddy’s church, why shouldn’t he have access to all the funds.

Usher: It’s a church Deak, it’s the people’s money.

Deacon: How do you get that Usher? It’s God’s money and his “annointed” will “further the kingdom” with it. After all, Creflo feels more comfortable ministering in a Rolls Royce toolin’ around Atlanta while Richard prefers a Mercedes or a Jaguar to be able to relate to the privileged in order to share the gospel with them. If you don’t have all the bling, you can’t get them to give and to sing. Kenny C, now he needs a jet airplane to minister the gosple at 30,000 feet on his way to the Fiji Islands.

Usher: And the questions of the people in regards to their unusual behavior have now become a witch hunt according to Richard (see caption below).

Richard Roberts, president of Oral Roberts University, said God told him “this lawsuit … is about intimidation, blackmail and extortion.”

Ex-head of Oral Roberts Univ. to get severance

Televangelist resigns from post amid allegations of misspent school funds

updated 8:03 p.m. ET,Wed., Aug. 13, 2008

TULSA, Oklahoma – The former president of an Oklahoma university founded by televangelist Oral Roberts, who stepped down amid allegations he misspent school funds to live in luxury, was offered a severance package but officials would not divulge its terms.

He and his wife, Lindsay, were accused of dropping money on shopping sprees, home improvements and a stable of horses for their daughters at a time when ORU was more than $50 million in debt. Both have repeatedly denied wrongdoing.

In her 1983 memoir, “Ashes to Gold,” Richard Roberts’ first wife, Patti, documented the jet-set lifestyle: a blue Mercedes as a Christmas gift for Richard, a Jaguar for her, Italian suits and Palm Beach vacations.

“We lived like characters in a novel or a made-for-TV movie about the beautiful people and I reveled in it,” she wrote. “Having made a truce, albeit an uneasy one, with my conscience over the source of our wealth, I proceeded to enjoy its prerogatives with total abandon.”

One person who says she observed the Roberts’s profligate spending up-close is Suzanne Culpepper. After hearing news of the lawsuit, she decided to come forward to recount her time working as a nanny for the Robertses one summer in the late 1980s, when she was an ORU student. Fed up with hearing the Robertses complain about the university’s financial hardship at the time, she snooped around their walk-in closet one night while the couple was out and the kids were asleep. It was “bigger than the one-bedroom apartment I live in now,” says Culpepper. She counted 275 pairs of shoes for Lindsay, all arranged by color, three rows of dresses and “tons of jewelry.” On Richard’s side, there were 160 suits, 454 ties and 18 pairs of golf shoes. (A university spokesman declined to respond to a request for comment on Culpepper’s description.) “I had a righteous anger to an injustice,” she says. “It is so sad that people have been misled, but the truth is coming out.” Until the Robertses get a chance to respond with their own version of events, they’re surely praying as fervently as ever.

updated 8:01 p.m. ET,Fri., Oct. 5, 2007

TULSA, Okla. – Twenty years ago, televangelist Oral Roberts said he was reading a spy novel when God appeared to him and told him to raise $8 million for Roberts’ university, or else he would be “called home.”

Now, his son, Oral Roberts University President Richard Roberts, says God is speaking again, telling him to deny lurid allegations in a lawsuit that threatens to engulf this 44-year-old Bible Belt college in scandal.

Richard Roberts is accused of illegal involvement in a local political campaign and lavish spending at donors’ expense, including numerous home remodeling projects, use of the university jet for his daughter’s senior trip to the Bahamas and a red Mercedes convertible and a Lexus SUV for his wife, Lindsay.

Usher: He actually put 2 million dollars of his
own money where his mouth is!

Deacon: Too bad you don’t have more money and less mouth!

MinistryWatch featured on 20/20 with John Stossel: MinistryWatch.com was recently interviewed on ABC’s 20/20 with John Stossel regarding the lack of financial transparency among some televangelists. A transcript of the interview is available (pdf) »HERE.« Please also see our amplification of the story »HERE« and a personal note from Rusty Leonard »HERE«.

Usher: Hey Deak, the North Point megachurch has figured the marketing out. Even one of their “lieutenants” shamelessly admits it on a blog. They’re buildilng video venues and charging 250K to other churches. Some of the new convert churches are even leaving traditional denominations. Now that’s an interesting way of stealing christians!

Deacon: Who needs a business plan and investors. Just open up a video church and fund your face all over the world. Warren publishes his in books, sells sermons and then has presidential debates at his church to get himself even more exposure. Very Oprahesque if you ask me. And how does he get all those people to come and worship in front of a screen?

Usher: Maybe he’s selling options on the side. I smell a new network and ad dollars. Maybe even a listing for Wall Street!

…..In a blog post, one of Stanley’s lieutenants compared the job of running a video venue to operating a franchise of another Christian-led business: Chick-fil-A. “Just like that Chick-fil-A owner/operator, I’m here in Nashville to open up our franchise and run it right,” wrote Eddie Johnson. “I believe in my company and what they are trying to ‘sell.’ “

Johnson told me that he never anticipated the vitriolic response his blog post would produce. (“This is where ‘Church, Inc.’ takes us,” wrote one commenter; another called Johnson the anti-Christ.) But he stands by his analogy. Most residents of Nashville, Tenn.—he estimates around 71 percent—don’t attend church regularly. If it takes a name-brand preacher to put butts in seats, so be it.

…While only a handful of churches can afford Buckhead’s $250,000 high-def system, it costs relatively little to project a DVD of the home church’s sermon from last week.